Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa.

M-Pesa, Safaricom's leading mobile money service, has been experiencing challenges this week. This disruption, reported on Monday and partially on Tuesday, impacted pay bill services and bank transfers, generating a stir among users.

Safaricom has not confirmed the source of the outage and has simply acknowledged the outages on its social media platforms.

"We are having a reoccurring service that is occasionally effecting some paybill payments. Our technical staff is working to resolve the issue, and we will notify you soon normal services return," Safaricom stated on X.

"We apologise for any inconvenience. We appreciate your patience." Safaricom added.

This is the second M-Pesa outage Safaricom has experienced this January. Two weeks ago, the same outage was also reported but the telco did not issue any statement until hours later after complaints from customers.

Rumours spread that the problem was caused by the Kenya Revenue Authority's attempts to connect M-PESA with its systems. Both KRA and Safaricom refuted the allegations.

M-Pesa, which launched in 2007, is Safaricom's major revenue source. According to the telco's fiscal year-end data, the company processed 6.4 billion M-PESA payments. M-Pesa had the biggest market share (96%) in September last year, followed by Airtel Money and T-Kash at 3.4% and 0.1%, respectively.

The inexplicable M-Pesa failure has sparked concerns about the country's overreliance on a single mobile money service. Businesses, governments, and the general people rely on the mobile money platform to carry out their operations.

M-PESA is now available in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, and, most recently, Ethiopia.